This is a slideshow created with Imagination. The images are all from the Gutenberg Project edition with corresponds with the Oxford Mark Twain. Imagination allows the use of empty slides between images. I'm utilizing them here rather than filling the spaces with various Twain portraits.

Twain is enraptured by the Cathedral of Milan. This is another slideshow produced with Imagination. I have not solved the color problem yet and I hope to spend more time playing with the transitions between slides in future shows.

Mark Twain travels to Italy and first lands at Genoa. He's not impressed by the architecture but the women capture him. I'm trying a different slideshow program with this chapter, Imagination. It uses ffmpeg to render the slideshow and as with the other programs has problems with the color rendition of the pictures but it has a large number of transformation functions to choose from. Note the brown sky around the cathedral, the original photo has blue sky. Also, the faces in the painting of Le Moulin are blue tinged rather than flesh toned, as found in the painting.

Twain is enraptured by Versailles. This is a rather interesting shift for Twain. Previously he has complained of the "worship of man" exhibited in the paintings of the "old masters" while here we have him waxing poetical over the works of man. He goes so far as to compare the gardens of Versailles with the Garden of Eden. It seems he even forgives the cost in human life it took to build the place.

Twain visits two "burying-grounds" in Paris, Pere la Chaise and St. Denis. He remarks on the ancient rulers of France, Dagobert, Clovis and Charlemagne, in St. Denis, and "the last home of scores of illustrious mean and women who were born to no titles, but achieved fame by their own energy and their own genius" in Pere la Chaise. Charlemagne was not interred at St. Denis but at Aachen Cathedral in modern day Germany. The tomb of Abelard and Heloise is found in Pere la Chaise and is a place of pilgrimage for the broken hearted.

Sight seeing in Paris, Mark imagines the scenes viewed by those saints found on the wall of Notre Dame. He visits the morgue and ponders the life and death of a drowned man stretched upon a slab. He is both shocked and drawn to the "outrageous" can-can. Some of the material for this chapter can be found in original form in letter Number Five published in the Daily Alta California, discussed in chapter 6 of McKeithan (1958). Portions of the letter can also be found in Chapters 12, 13 and 16 of the book.